In the Awards family, the Oscars are the stuffy aunt whose opinion the family respects and around whom the family is on their best behavior. Everyone wears their best (or so they think) and they are polite and smile and thank everyone under the sun and lose with grace. Last night was not really any different. Ellen DeGeneres hosted for her first time, and did a swell job. I especially liked her red velvet suit and her “Oscar Carrier”... 

UPDATE: Winning speeches were selected on February 22, 2007. …so many worthy entries that picking just one winner seemed as churlish as Judi Dench’s role in Notes on a Scandal. So the staff at NPR.org picked five winners, along with a few runners-up, and recorded them reading their entries. … winners captured the spirit of the nominees’ characters, if not always their accents. The speeches were limited to 200 words,... 

The nominations are in. Here is a short list of the “big ones”. Noticeably absent from Best Picture is Dreamgirls, which many “in the know” thought would be nominated for sure. Looks like they’re not as “in” as they thought. Best Picture: -Babel -Letters From Iwo Jima -Little Miss Sunshine -The Departed -The Queen Best Actor: -Leonardo DeCaprio for Blood Diamond -Ryan Gosling for Half Nelson -Peter...